Family Farm: Mathew Ritchie
According to Bourriaud we’re in a society governed by the quest for perpetual novelty. Since he feels we don’t expect novelty in art anymore or that it is not important, the role of art has changed in society (once again) and what is that role? I think that much of the art mentioned by Bourriaud is very novel and that even contemporary artists are by nature driven to find new inventions and original ways to express current themes. This is also expressed in the fact that artists are distancing themselves from “established fields and disciplines.” They are looking to creating new disciplines that may be more relevant to the 21st and coming centuries.
Kendal Geers Painting used to be a window into the world and humanity; is film the new “window” into human emotions and is contemporary art taking on more the role of making us take a closer look at elements of media, entertainment, travel and other tangible products while film takes on the role of shaping consciousness? There seems to be less importance placed on emotion in visual art now unlike during modernism.
The idea that we are in a disposable world but if an art object is disposable it contradicts the idea that ‘cultural objects need to endure” and is an interesting paradox. If we are in a “precarious aesthetic regime” one of uncluttering, then the idea of leaving behind art that documents our times is not possible unless, in the age of mechanical reproduction, the art is documented digitally; much like our digital books. There will be no need for the tangible book/object to remain.
Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers.
In many ways the accessibility of high-speed air travel has everything to do with this idea journey as an art form. Connecting, wandering and interpreting signs: cultural orientation can be altered in a matter of hours as never before. Bourriaud mentions contemporary paintings and its use of visuals that resemble cartography in the age of GPS and that all geography becomes “psychogeography.” One can simply look out of a plane window and see the landscapes from a cartographer’s vantage point. We are more and more seeing things from afar.
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s 2001 underwater film Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam is a haunting poetic meditation on Vietnam’s journey into an unknown future.
Place is depicted but unidentifiable in much of contemporary art today often being “a place anywhere in the world.” We are by nature nomadic creatures and now that we are released from the bonds of agriculture and that the earth is known, we search unchartered territories/spaces in our dreams that is manifesting in our arts. It would seem we also seek new places of solitude in contemporary art, virtual realities and extraterrestrial fantasies because our world is becoming overpopulated and cluttered.
Mannequins Relies (2006) Tom Hirschorn 
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